


Ten Thousand Hours

by aeli_kindara



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean in Hell, Gen, Season/Series 12
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 16:30:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13035045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: On Dean's birthday, Mary realizes how much about her sons she doesn't know.





	Ten Thousand Hours

**Author's Note:**

> Probably not quiite S12 canon-compliant, but reasonably close?
> 
> This was the closest to being complete of several "Mary finds out about the boys' history" fics I started last season, so I figured I'd wrap it up. Things get dark! And also maybe funny, but maybe that's just me.

“So,” says Mary, spreading her hands flat on the table. “What are we doing for Dean’s birthday?”

Sam pauses, bottle halfway to his mouth. He glances sidelong at Castiel, draws in a breath as if to speak, then stops.

“Dean…” Cas begins. He glances back at Sam, then fixes his eyes on Mary. “Doesn’t enjoy birthday celebrations,” he concludes.

“What? Why not?”

Another shared look, and there’s _definitely_ something they’re keeping from her here. “Don’t worry about it,” Sam says finally. “I’m not sure he’ll even be here.”

\---

The morning of his birthday, Dean is gone. Bed unslept in, Impala still in the garage; he’s just vanished. When Mary goes to Sam, alarmed, he rubs his eyes, looking weary.

“It’s all right,” he says. “He’ll be back.”

“ _Damn_ it, Sam,” she snaps. “Stop coddling me and _tell me_ what is going on!”

Sam drops his hand, looking guilty, and a little taken aback. “I’m sorry, Mom. It’s just… Dean’s got some bad memories around his birthday, is all. He likes to spend it alone.”

“What happened?”

Her son hesitates for a long minute. Then he admits, quietly, “I don’t know.”

Mary’s temper snaps. After all, isn’t she still her boys’ mother? If Sam won’t talk about it, then damn it, she’ll get Dean to tell her himself. “Screw it,” she snaps. “I’m going after him.”

“I don’t really think —” Sam starts, reaching to stop her, but subsides at the glare she shoots him. “He’s probably at Donnie’s bar. If you really want… but, Mom, there’s a reason he doesn’t want to be around family.”

“I’m his mother.” She states it with a finality that she’ll later wonder whether she should feel, and sweeps out of the room.

\---

Dean’s exactly where Sam said he would be, sitting at the bar, sipping calmly on a whiskey with distant eyes. He doesn’t seem to notice as Mary comes up beside him — a far cry from the ever-vigilant hunter her son has grown into.

“Dean,” she says gently. Then, when he doesn’t respond, “ _Dean._ ”

If there’s anything she expected, it wasn’t this. Dean is on his feet in a split second, knocking over the bar stool in his haste to retreat. His eyes are wide, hands spread and shaking, knees slightly bent. He looks ready to run.

“ _Dean_ ,” Mary says again, raising her hands placatingly. “It’s just me, love. Is there — what’s wrong?”

The tense silence stretches on for what seems like minutes. Dean doesn’t twitch, doesn’t move a muscle, just stares at her with wide eyes, chest rising and falling as if it’s the only part of him that’s alive. Finally, he whispers, “Mom?”

She takes a cautious step forward. “It’s me, honey.”

“What are you doing here?” Dean asks, warily.

“Sam thought you might be here.” Mary takes another step, sees Dean stiffen, and stops. “I thought I’d — it’s your birthday, baby. What’s wrong?”

“Please leave,” her son says, in a voice that shakes.

Mary watches him, uncertain. This is so unlike the Dean she’s gotten to know, she has no idea what to make of it. “No,” she responds finally, and sees her son stiffen. “No,” she repeats. “I’m not going to leave. I am going to go sit at the table over there, and order a drink, and you don’t have to sit with me if you don’t want to. You don’t have to stay here at all. But I will be at the table, until midnight, and I’d welcome some company.”

Dean stares at her, and says nothing.

So Mary does as she’s said — orders a whiskey of her own, makes her way to the table in the corner, not looking at her son, still frozen where she left him.

She’s been there a few minutes when Dean straightens, turns slightly, and leaves through the kitchen doors.

\---

Three hours pass before she sees him again. He’s standing on the street corner, some fifty yards away, watching her through the glass. There’s a slight frown on his face. She thinks of the skittish dogs her mom used to take home, and doesn’t look directly at him, just takes another sip of her drink.

It’s five, maybe ten more minutes before the door creaks slightly, and then Dean is sliding stiffly onto the seat across from her.

“Hi, Mom,” he says softly, and it’s so much like that broken half-whisper the night she came back, it’s hard for her not to show her heartbreak on her face.

“Hi, Dean,” she responds.

“I’m sorry for acting how I did,” he says, stiffly, not meeting her eyes.

“You don’t need to be sorry, love.”

Dean flinches. “Can you — not call me that?” His voice comes out with a forced harshness. “Not today.”

There will be other times to question that. “All right,” Mary agrees.

Her son lets out a long breath. “Thanks.”

Mary says nothing, just watches him. It takes several long minutes before Dean speaks again.

“I — this is the second time I’ve turned thirty-eight,” he says.

There’s a lot of things she could say, mostly something along the lines of — _What? I don’t understand. What do you mean?_ Which is all useless, because Dean already knows that.

“I don’t think anyone’s told you,” he continues, finally. “I sold my soul to a crossroads demon, ten years ago. Spent some time in hell, before Cas hauled me out.”

For a moment, Mary can’t breathe. “What did you buy?” she asks, finally, in a whisper.

Dean glances up at her, meets her eyes properly for the first time today, if only for an instant. “Sammy’s life.”

_Oh, Dean._ “How long?”

Her son hesitates, staring at his hands. “Forty years. Four months, up here.”

“You turned thirty-eight in hell.”

Dean’s mouth twists. “He would always — throw me a party, he called it. And I’d — I used to fucking fall for it, you know? They can alter the reality around you, down there, make you see things… I’d suddenly be free and everyone would be there, alive and well, you and Sammy and —” He cuts himself short, suddenly, pressing white lips together. “And it would all go wrong,” he finishes hoarsely.

The street lights are starting to come on outside, sun slowly sinking behind the hills to the west. Mary stares at the space on the table between her son’s hands and her own, quells the urge to reach out. “I’m so sorry, Dean.”

Her son swallows. For a while, neither of them speaks. Then he says, “Last time I turned thirty-eight, I —”

But he stops there, and after a moment Mary whispers, “What is it?”

“Forget it.”

“No.”

Their eyes lock for a minute, then Dean sighs. “You gave me my own eyes, as a birthday present. Cut ‘em out slow.”

The horror steals over her slowly. She chokes on it, wide-eyed, staring at her son. He’s looking back at her with those sad green eyes, and then he tenses, and she can see that his lips are moving, but she can’t hear him, not over the buzzing in her ears, and how can he sit here so calmly, how can he talk to her like this, with these memories living in his head? How can he not hate her?

“Mom. _Mom._ ” Strong hands are gripping hers, and she sucks in a shaky breath. “It wasn’t you, Mom, okay? I _know_ that. It wasn’t real.”

It’s only when he reaches up to gently wipe a tear from her cheek that she realizes she’s crying, breath shuddering in and out. “ _Dean,_ ” she breathes.

“It’s okay, Mom.” And then he’s sliding from his seat, coming around the table, gathering her close in his arms. Her cheek is pressed to his chest, tears wetting his shirt. “It’s okay. Shh, hey, it’s okay.”

\---

They go out to eat in a diner in town, then pick up a pumpkin pie and head back to the bunker. Mary thinks she feels Dean tense at her side when Sam and Cas look up at them, surprised, from the bottom of the stairs, but then he’s leading the way down, announcing in a nonchalant voice, “Picked up some pie, if you want some.”

It’s a quiet evening, all things considered, and if Dean’s sticking a little close to her, Mary’s not sure which of them he’s trying to protect. After pie, Dean settles into the armchair in the library, starts leafing through a stack of old Men of Letters reports. Sam catches Mary’s eye, and she rises, a little hesitantly, to follow him into the kitchen. His eyes follow them on their way out, but Dean doesn’t comment.

“What happened?” Sam whispers, turning to face her with his hands gripping the countertop. “I’ve never been able to get through to him at all, on his birthday. Not since…” He cuts himself off abruptly.

“Not since he came back from hell?”

Sam stills, and his eyes dart from left to right, studying her face. “He told you?”

Mary shivers suddenly, and can’t help but wrap her arms tightly around herself. “He said… he was down there for forty years. That this — someone, I don’t know who, would throw him a ‘party’ on his birthdays, trick him into thinking he was free and his family was alive, and then —” She stops, shuddering.

“We’d torture him, wouldn’t we?” asks Sam quietly.

Mary gives a jerk of a nod.

“Are you okay?” Sam asks softly.

Mary gives a startled huff of laughter. “I will be? I suppose?”

Sam is watching her with sad eyes. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

She takes a deep breath. “Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“Can you promise me something?”

Her son goes still. After a moment, he says, “Honestly? I don’t know. Depends what it is.”

“Can you — no more secrets? I thought — when I thought my sons had grown up as hunters, that was bad enough, and John’s journal took some processing, but _this?_ ” She shakes her head. “I don’t want to — I need to know these things, Sam. Please.”

But her son is biting his lip. “Mom… you don’t know what you’re asking.”

Dread pools in her stomach. “That’s exactly my point,” she whispers.

The voice from the doorway makes them both jump. Castiel is leaning there casually, watching them. “If it would make things easier for you,” he says, looking at Sam, “I could try to explain.”

Sam glances between them. It takes him a long moment to nod, throat bobbing as he swallows. “Yeah,” he says, hoarsely. “Yeah, okay. Should I —”

He moves toward the door, but Cas puts out a hand to stop him. “I don’t think,” he says, “that your brother is entirely comfortable being alone with you right now.”

For a moment, Sam just looks at him with wide, wounded eyes. Then he nods quickly, and Mary can see the tears in his eyes. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, okay. I’ll stay.”

Castiel watches him for another moment. Then, apparently satisfied, he looks back at Mary. “I have found that humans appreciate alcohol when hearing difficult news. Would you prefer vodka, or beer?”

“I’ll — I’ll stick to beer, thanks.” Mary forces a tiny laugh. “You’re scaring me, Castiel.”

Cas gives her a look, and pulls two beers from the fridge. “You are correct to be scared. Your sons have been at the center of more conflicts over the fate of the universe than perhaps any other humans in history. I knew Abraham, you know. Crossed paths with Job. Their sacrifices, their pain…” He shakes his head. “They would count themselves lucky, if they knew the Winchesters.”

Sam lets out a surprised bark of laughter. “You’re really making her feel better, Cas,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s not _that_ bad.”

Cas tilts his head quizzically. “Sam,” he says. “You have spent your whole life afraid that there is evil living in the demon blood inside of you, and hounded by the demon that killed your mother. You were killed in a death match with the demon’s other ‘special children,’ and brought back when your brother sold his soul to save you. A year later, you watched your brother get ripped apart by hellhounds, and spent four months mourning him and trying and failing to get him back before I raised him from hell. You unintentionally freed Lucifer from his cage, became his vessel, and flung yourself back into the cage in order to imprison him once more. You spent a year as a soulless killing machine while your soul suffered in hell, then nearly lost your mind for good when the fragments of your self were finally reunited. Around the same time, you lost your only remaining father figure, Dean and I were blasted to Purgatory for a year, and you were completely alone for the first time in your life.” He shakes his head. “You undertook a series of trials to close the gates of hell, and were nearly killed in the process. You were possessed by the angel who betrayed the Garden of Eden, and your body used to kill your dear friend. You lost your brother _again_ , to the Mark of Cain; watched him die once more and become a demon; were nearly killed by him yourself; endured much and lost a dear friend seeking to save him from the Mark; and finally succeeded only by releasing the Darkness into the world. You have suffered greatly, my friend.”

Mary’s head is spinning. “You were _also_ in hell?” she whispers.

Sam sighs. “Yeah, Mom, but it’s really okay, I’m —”

“His soul spent over a century there,” Cas interrupts. “It was returned to his body by Death, who erected a wall so that his memories of torture would not drive him insane. That wall was removed — by me, during a time I betrayed my friends and sought to make myself God.”

Sam is watching Castiel with empathy in his eyes. “He also saved me. I handled it for a while, but it got to a point where — Lucifer was popping up everywhere around me, altering my reality. Cas — took that on himself.”

Cas gives Mary a hard look. “I’m better now.”

“I also —” Sam shakes his head, sighing. “I know I was in hell for longer than Dean, and that — he never really lost his marbles like I did, after. But I’m not sure I had it worse.”

Castiel is watching him, and Mary thinks that they’re doing this partly for her, to give her time to wrap her brain around everything that’s being said. “You were caged with Lucifer himself.”

“I know.” Sam flexes his hand restlessly. “But Dean… I mean, he was with Alastair, you know? This demon who…” He shudders, glancing at Mary. “Hell’s torturer-in-chief. He _liked_ it there. Demons don’t, you know — they all want to be topside, they hate being in hell, but not Alastair. Lucifer was bad, but he wasn’t… it was different, I think.”

“Aren’t you leaving out a pretty important piece of the story?” says a quiet voice from the door.

Mary starts, and Sam looks guilty. Cas merely turn his head to study Dean. He looks calm, unease belied only by the slightly too square set of his shoulders, hands thrust too deep in his pockets.

No one speaks.

“You think I never lost my marbles? I _broke_ , Sam. I turned into one of them. You know that.”

Mary’s mouth feels very dry. She glances back and forth between her sons, whose eyes are locked on each other.

“ _I_ was a torturer. Alastair’s star pupil,” Dean grates out. “I was good at it. I still am. You think I avoid you, these days, because I’m afraid of you?” His eyes are hard. “I’m afraid of what I’d do to you. What I _did_ to you. That tradition never stopped, you know, just because I was on the other side of the knife.”

“Dean.” Sam’s voice is shaking. “You would never… not for real.”

But Dean’s not looking at him. His eyes are lidded, gaze somewhere else, inscrutable; his face shifts, like the tumblers of a lock clicking into place, and the corner of his mouth rises in the faintest of smiles.

“He’s seen it,” he says casually, and paces across the room.

It takes Mary a moment to realize who Dean’s talking about. It’s only when she sees the gutted look on Castiel’s face that she puts two and two together. “Dean,” he says.

“The words,” Dean says over him. He’s reached the knife block on the counter; his fingers glide over their handles, taking their time. “Slice, carve. They’re literal —” he pulls a knife from its place and turns it, studying its blade — “but they’re not.”

“You don’t have to explain,” Sam says unsteadily. “We get it, Dean. We do. We —”

_We love you,_ Mary thinks he’ll say, but Dean speaks first, turning to lean back against the counter, knife still in his hand. “How long does Malcolm Gladwell say it takes to get good at a thing, Sammy?”

Sam’s throat works. “Ten thousand hours.”

“And how long did I have?”

Sam doesn’t answer. He looks miserable, furious.

“Nine times that,” Castiel says.

Dean nods. He leans back, watching the blade in his hand flash reflections of the kitchen lights. “When I look at a knife,” he says, “I see possibilities. Thousands of them. Half for things you couldn’t even do, topside — carving the memories out of a person’s skull, the fears. Severing them and turning them back to see what’s underneath.” He raises his gaze. “I’ve done them all. I’ve _wanted_ to.”

His eyes are locked on Mary’s.

She remembers her earlier reaction with a piercing pain in her gut. That soul-engulfing horror, at the thought of hurting her child. Dean’s comfort: _It wasn’t real. It wasn’t you._

But it was real, of course. And it was him.

“Did it help you survive?” she says.

There’s a startled rustle as Sam and Castiel both turn to look at her. Mary swallows, and doesn’t break Dean’s gaze.

“Doing that,” she says. “Being whatever you had to become. Did it keep you strong enough to make it out alive? Did it help to make you the man you are today?”

Dean doesn’t answer her. His gaze doesn’t flicker, but something in his face fades.

“Yes,” says Castiel.

Mary steps forward. She can feel three pairs of eyes on her as she crosses the kitchen to stand before her son. She sets down her beer on the counter. “Then good,” she says, and holds out her hand.

Dean looks down at the knife again, and turns the handle in his palm. He presses it into her hand gently, blade edge outward, and lingers for a moment to curl her fingers around it, secure. His touch is warm. He lets his hand fall, turns his head, and closes his eyes.

Mary puts the knife on the counter, and pulls her son into a hug.

\---

She finds Castiel after Sam and Dean are asleep.

He’s reading in the library; he doesn’t sleep himself, he’s explained, and this seems to be his usual late night haunt. Mary considers bringing him a drink, and one for herself, but she doesn’t. She stands before him empty-handed, in the worn flannel and loose jeans that are her people’s uniform, and says, “Thank you for saving my sons.”

Castiel studies her. Mary isn’t sure if surprise would show on his face. “I don’t deserve your gratitude,” he says.

“You do,” Mary counters. “We condemned them to this life, their father and I. You helped them make it worth living.”

Castiel’s lips part, uncertain, and he doesn’t answer. _There’s the surprise, after all,_ Mary thinks. “Accept the compliment, Castiel.”

He swallows. “Thank you,” he says gravely. “I will — endeavor to be worthy of it.”

Mary nods, and closes her eyes. The facade cracks without warning, and suddenly her face is crumpling, chest heaving, and she gasps, “Do you think I — will I ever be worthy to call myself their mother?”

Castiel doesn’t insult her agony with empty comfort. Mary sinks to her knees and wraps her arms around herself. She wants to scream it out to the heavens, this raw grief; wants to beat the floor with her fists, to tear at her hair. Instead she folds her arms tighter and shakes harder and wishes, in some cowardly corner of her heart, to be back in heaven. To know nothing of this. She wishes it harder than she has ever wished anything, and hates herself to the core.

“My superiors wanted Dean to break,” says Castiel.

Mary opens her eyes. His image swims strangely in the haze of tears over her vision. “What?”

Cas’s hands are clenched together tight, and his gaze is on something far away. “I didn’t know,” he says, “but I still failed — to get to him sooner, to understand why it took us so long to break through. I — will always wonder if I could have spared him that.”

Mary stares. Castiel looks down to meet it. The understanding in his eyes seems to brighten their blue. On his face is a rueful smile.

“As to your question,” he says. “We can only try.”


End file.
